What is Marketing
I absolutely LOVE Marketing. Its seriously my Passion, my career and my hobby. I urge any business owner to make marketing your hobby. Time just passes by when you do things you love.
Marketing is EVERYTHING!! It is everything from the way you turn up to a meeting to TV ads on the super bowl and everything in between. Marketing is the management of transferring ideas and concepts from a business to a customer.
What is a Marketing Campaign
A marking campaign is a way of organizing your marketing into bite sized, manageable projects. They have a start date and a finish date. They have a purpose and a reason. They have an action that consumers are meant to complete. This is called the conversion. The conversion is the end goal. We judge the success of a marketing marketing campaign on the conversion rate. Generally the conversion is based on a financial amount or percentage but not always. It may be the amount of visitors to a webpage, it may be a public awareness campaign where we hold a survey after to judge how effective it has been. Regardless there is always a result that must be measured.
Running a business with a Marketing Strategy
Marketing is a very powerful tool, in fact I considerate to be the life blood of your business. A consistent flow of customers is the only way to have long term success in business. Regardless of what type of business you have a marketing campaign is essential. Here are some key steps to starting your campaign.
- Identify your target market
- Work out how they receive their information
- Create a plan
- Choose your methods
- Pre launch
- Launch
- Check the results
Unfortunately we see this every day. Businesses struggling to make ends meet and really just trying to take anything and everything that comes their way just to pay the bills. This is not good for the business and its not good for the customers. It means they take on anything even it doesn’t suit them or they are not the best business to be doing the work. We see it so much in web design. Business that have gone with someone cheap or that they just found, who could kind of do the job but didn’t really have the skills or experience to forecast issues that are going to arise. We are all good at something and we all have our core business but we end up fixing so many problems caused by inexperienced web designers. Its important to make sure your designer doesn’t just make pretty sites but that they know how to drive business. After all a pretty site will not bring customers it will just look pretty. The problem is they can look great but 12 months down the track the site is just not ranking and its just not converting. And we all know exactly how important it is to do both of these.
Running a campaign doesn’t have to be hard or confusing, but running it as a project helps you to save money and more importantly it helps you to understand what worked and what didn’t. This is so important because you have learn from your mistakes and repeat what worked.
Here is a situation I personally consulted on very recently, and its more common than you may think. A medium sized retailer sold products both online and from a storefront. There biggest problem was stock management. A 12 month marketing campaign fixed this issue. It fixes it because we know know at what month sales and promotions are going to happen. There is a pre-launch stage where the promotional part of the campaign happens. The segmented list of customers are notified via an email campaign and the market is tested. We know what proportion are interested and we know exactly how much stock to arrange to have ready. We launch and run the promotion, sell out the items and test the results. This is then planned over a 12 month period with the full product range. Plan – prelaunch – launch – collect results.We now know exactly what is needed for the next 12 months and it runs continually. The role of a business owner changes from being in the business to working on campaigns, and reviewing the results form previous campaigns. It allows you to truly run your business rather than slogging through the busy times and pancaking through the quiet times. With a campaign run business you can plan your next 12 months and be ready with stock, staff and know exactly how much you will earn at any given point. You can plan your holidays and arrange when your staff should go on leave. Even as a sole trader with no other employees, you can easily have holidays and take the time you need to relax and recharge. Although running a campaign based business will mean you will be much much busier.